CNMC bare-metal

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The CNMC bare-metal (hereinafter, the Metal) is the technology that supports the CNM Cyber project, Urdu Project, and CNM Cyber's project in Ukraine.


Needs

The Metal's owner would like to be in business of workforce development. The Metal shall provide learners, who are employment aspirants, with laboratory environment that would include various end-user applications, as well as virtual machines (hereinafter, VMs) and containers that host them. The end-user applications shall include AVideo, GitLab, HumHub, MediaWiki, Moodle, Odoo, Roundcube, SuiteCRM, and WordPress and some others. Through their hands-on training and internships, the learners shall possess those competencies and credentials that shall help these learners to land new jobs or advance in their current employment. These competencies and credentials shall range from bare-metal server to end-user application design, implementation, administration, and retirement.

User stories

  1. As a workforce developer, I need my learners to have hands-on training opportunities on those software packages that are in demand on the job market.
  2. As a training provider, I want to have authority to give a particular learner to access a VM that hosts a particular software package, so this learner will be able to explore, provision, modify, and restore the package.
  3. As a learner, I want to access a VM, which I am authorized to access, in order to explore, provision, modify, and restore the application that this VM hosts.

Milestones

We plan to:

  1. Purchase the Metal, setup RAID, OpenZFS and ProxmoxVE, as well as secure them.
  2. Setup a high-availability secure cluster of WordPress instances on the purchased Metal.
  3. Setup a high-availability cluster of three bare-metal servers, including the main server that has been used in the Ukraine project and and the Metal.

Server layer

To support the project technologically, we created a platform with 3 VPS at contabo.com and one proxmox instance at hetzner.de in Germany. At the nest stage of the project, we may add one or two bare-metal servers in the same datacenter with the existing one. The additional server or servers shall be similar to the current one, probably, with smaller RAM. Later, we would also like to explore OVH servers.

Bare-metal

The characteristics of the current bare-metal server are as follows:

  • Dedicated Root Server SB35
  • Intel Core i7-3930
  • 2x HDD SATA 3,0 TB
  • 8x RAM 8192 MB DDR3
  • NIC 1 Gbit - Intel 82579LM
  • Location: FSN1 (Falkenstein/Vogtland, Germany) -- DC7
  • Rescue system (English)

One expert stated that using i7 processors have some disadvantages. Another expert replied that, indeed, i7 processors may have troubles with something like PCI passthrough, but for this particular project at this particular stage, they are just fine.

Virtualization

ProxmoxVE is the only package under consideration; Debian shall be used as its OS.

Disk-redundancy

ProxmoxVE ships with OpenZFS, so, we consider using it strongly. Other implementations of software-based RAID at various levels shall also be discussed. We don't consider hardware-based solutions at this stage.

Server security

We plan 5 measures to ensure the Metal security at the server layer:

  1. Using iptables, ban everything what is not allowed
  2. fail2ban to prevent brute-force attacks
  3. Changing default ports, especially 22/SSH
  4. Setting up the new SSH port to key based authentication so who have the key they can access.
  5. Creating a whitelist of static IP addresses that are allowed to access the new SSH port

One specialist also proposed to use Config Server Security and Firewall (CSF), so when anyone do wrong attempt with our server it will auto blocked on three wrong attempt, also we can block any country any location any ip any isp etc with firewall.

IP addresses

On the main server, either local IP or private IP range with DHCP is used. Unless specific concerns arise, we plan to use 2 IPv4 addresses. We are also open to explore IPv6. If we use About ipv4 addresses, we need 5 ips: one for main server, two for gateway, three for any vps or container and four for wordpress vps, and 5 for anyother we need in future.

Server monitoring

To monitor the Metal performance at the server layer, we plan to deploy both:

Server-level HA

ProxmoxVE ships with its HA tool called HA-manager; however, it requires 3 bare-metal servers to be implemented. At this stage, we consider working with only one bare-metal server. Thus, we consider using HAProxy and/or, possibly, CDN between the existing bare-metal server and VPSes.

Application layer

Our main server and its WordPress instances were hacked a few times. This is a description of what happened with the server (it is in Russian though) -- https://pravka.bskol.com/ru/%D0%9E%D0%BF%D1%8B%D1%82%D0%BD%D1%8B_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82

HA clusters

We plan to use High_Availability_Cluster

In addition to the bare-server, we plan to deploy one VPS in the US to extend the high-availability of its core applications. We cannot consider Cloudflare for the project because this would limit hands-on training opportunities for future students.

Monitoring

Firewalls

Applications

WordPress

core, plugin, theme cloudflare as web app firewall

  • WordPress -- VM or container model? we can use kvm based vms as well, but normally containers will be ok. we can use one vps for wordpress also.
  • What would we do for its security? For securety we can use antivirus
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